Nicole's somnambulant state has been so severe that she once slept through the holidays, awaking one day in January when she finally opened Christmas gifts alongside her family, according to ChartiersValley.Patch.com.

"She's never really adjusted to it," her mother, Vicki Delien told the website. "She's 17 now and it really upsets her. She's missed out on a lot."

Delien told talks show host Jeff Probst (see video above) that the teen has at times slept 32 to 64 days in a row, waking only in sleepwalking mode to eat.

In Nicole's case, it took 25 months for doctors to diagnose her, according to ChartiersValley.Patch.com, and everything from a virus, to epilepsy to West Nile was bandied about, including, unfortunately, the possibility she was faking it for attention.

If you've ever drifted off to sleep or just woken up from sleep but were unable to move any part of your body -- spurring a sense that you are frozen in your bed -- you may have experienced sleep paralysis.
Sleep paralysis is more common in the seconds to minutes when we're first waking up, whether in the morning or in the middle of the night, Gehrman said.
When we are in REM sleep, our muscles are paralyzed so that we don't act out our dreams. But with sleep paralysis, a part of the brain wakes sooner than the rest, giving a sense of wakefulness and alertness -- even though the body's muscles are still paralyzed, Gehrman explained.
However, <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/paralysis.html" target="_hplink">sleep paralysis isn't dangerous</a> despite the unsettling feeling experienced by people who have been through it, according to Stanford University. To decrease the number of sleep paralysis episodes you have, stress reduction, getting enough hours of sleep a night and making sure you have a good sleep schedule could help.